My paternal grandfather was called Bunco by us and Poh-Poh by the other paternal cousins. Bunco was from Oklahoma. The whole batch of them, the Lang’s, were deemed hayseed unsophisticates by Granny, my mother’s mother, who never let us forget that our, that is her, family went back to Davy Crockett and Tennessee, which she thought conferred some sort of nobility. Though an impoverished widow who worked as a single mom on refinery row, Granny thought of herself as a fallen noble. She was a proud Episcopalian. My father converted in a vain attempt to win her over. He died an Episcopalian lay pastor in Livingston, a podunk East Texas town on the edge of the Piney Woods.
Carnet intime